All "Elliott Smith" stories

The new Elliott Smith documentary Heaven Adores You opened in select theaters this weekend, and a short clip from the film has made its way online via Billboard that breaks down the process behind recording and putting together the XO track “Tomorrow Tomorrow.” Watch the clip and revisit the song below. More »

The 2000 chamber-pop opus Figure 8 is the last studio album Elliott Smith completed before his death in 2003; it’s the one with the album cover that was turned into a mural in Los Angeles in tribute to Smith. And although I’m partial to Smith’s hushed, lo-fi early work, my heart flutters at the thought… More »

Last November, Ben Gibbard and Mark Kozelek shared a chain of email exchanges about alienating their fans, living in California, and the gentrification of San Francisco. In the latest installment of The Thread, Ben Gibbard and Kozelek correspond about their lives on the road and the difficulties of touring (Kozelek claims to be “Europed the… More »

The latest installment of PBS Digital Studios’ Blank On Blank animated series features a previously unheard interview with Elliott Smith, which was recorded shortly after his famed performance at the 1998 Oscars. In the fragmented interview, Smith speaks to British music critic Barney Hoskyns about his decision to start playing music acoustically, growing up listening… More »

Near the beginning of the year, the spectral folk singer Marissa Nadler released a soft glow of an album called July. Today, she’s hitting us with Before July, a digital-only EP that includes four demos — two July songs and two unreleased songs. And it’s also got Nadler’s atmospheric, vaguely gothy cover of “Pitseleh,” a… More »

Talking about the dead — especially those with tremendous, all-encompassing legacies — is a contentious task for any music critic. The conversations around deceased artists often get trapped in discussions about their legend — how they died, why they died, what their trajectory means in a broader context, what death does to fans — making… More »

Heaven Adores You is a new, Kickstarter-funded Elliott Smith doc from director Nickolas Rossi, promoted as “an intimate, meditative inquiry into the life and music of Elliott Smith” and featuring previously unreleased songs. The film opens with a 1998 interview on Dutch TV in which Smith discusses his newfound fame after performing “Miss Misery” at… More »

The new two-disc compilation I Saved Latin! A Tribute To Wes Anderson collects covers of songs from the soundtracks of Anderson’s movies — Telekinesis covers the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow,” Mike Watt does the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s (a band named after an Anderson character) takes on “Ziggy… More »

Elliott Smith at the 70th Academy Awards ceremony: When it’s mentioned, it’s as one of those cautionary anecdotes, an example of the fundamental incompatibility of the underground with commercial artistry. But it’s all there, or if it isn’t, we can pretend it is. Trisha Yearwood has finished her performance, and the onstage columns drift apart… More »

It’s fitting that while so many artists spent last Monday playing covers and sharing memories of Elliott Smith, the ever surly punk band FIDLAR show up a week late with their own tribute. Released via Tumblr with the simple message “WHOOPS totally forgot to post this… RIP Elliot Smith :_(” this isn’t a noisy and… More »

There are lots of words to toss around when Elliott Smith comes up — brilliant, troubled, influential, tragic, one-of-a-kind — each of which fit the music as much as the man. But if pressed for a single descriptor, I’d choose fragile. More »

It feels like a swift kick to the stomach to say, but on 10/21 it will be 10 years since iconic singer/song-writer Elliott Smith passed away. On that day this year, Cat Power, Zachary Cole Smith with Sky Ferreira, and more will pay tribute to the singer at a concert at Brooklyn’s Glasslands. Other performer… More »

Here’s an interesting new mutation for Elliott Smith’s cultural legacy. Madonna and fashion photographer Steven Klein have this new 17-minute short film with called SecretProjectRevolution, which apparently functions as some sort of protest against the prison industrial complex. Last night, there was a launch party for the event at Gagosian Gallery in New York, and… More »

As we mentioned in our list of Elliott Smith’s 10 best songs, Kill Rock Stars has deemed August to be Elliott Smith month, in honor of his 8/6 birthday, and they’ve been kindly flooding the market with alternate versions of some old tracks, mostly from Elliott’s third and final KRS LP, Either/Or. “Ballad Of Big… More »

Elliott Smith was born on August 6, 1969, and thus, August is Elliott Smith Month, according to his onetime label, Kill Rock Stars. To celebrate, KRS has been generously offering fans alternate versions of some oldElliotttracks: previously unheard versions of songs that appeared on Smith’s 1995 and ’97 releases, Elliott Smith and Either/Or,… More »

Kill Rock Stars has been generous with the Elliott Smith alternate takes this August — Elliott Smith Month, they’re calling it, in honor of his 8/6 birthday. First we got “Alameda,” then “Punch And Judy,” plus an offer of a scrapped trumpet-led version of “Needle In The Hay” in exchange for an email address. “Angeles”… More »

All these years later, it’s amazing that there are still unheard Elliott Smith recordings out there, but there totally are. The man would’ve turned 43 this week, and Kill Rock Stars is marking the occasion by posting things like an alternate version of “Alameda” and now this. The unheard version of “Punch And Judy” i… More »

In celebration of what would have been Elliott Smith’s 43rd birthday, Kill Rock Stars is releasing some rare and previously unreleased tracks from their archives. Today, they put forth an alternate version of “Alameda” from the Either/Or sessions that features some different lyrics. Stream it below. More »

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The Doors are part of a very specific category of classic-rock artists: the gateway artists. The bands that — assuming you weren’t around in the ’60s — are amongst the first names you explore when you start digging into pop music’s past. Though keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore were all… More »

Last night, U2 played the seventh night of an eight-night stand at Madison Square Garden. (Our own young classic rocker Ryan Leas reviewed one of those shows earlier in the week.) And at last night’s show, the band introduced a few special local guests. There was New York royalty Paul Simon, who came out to… More »

After reportedly showing up half an hour late, rapper Travi$ Scott got his Lollapalooza set shut down after only 5 minutes by encouraging fans to jump the security barrier and rush the stage. Festival organizers deemed the resulting chaos to be unsafe and shut the whole thing down, with security forcibly removing Scott from the… More »

Morrissey often uses his True To You website to write about cases of what he considers to be societal injustice, as he did in the recent post blasting the killer of Cecil the lion. But as Pitchfork points out, Morrissey’s latest post for the site details a much more personal violation. Morrissey writes that, a… More »

Eminem is a pretty fit dude — for a while, he was even attached to star in Antoine Fuqua’s new boxing movie Southpaw. So how does Eminem stay a pretty fit dude? By working out compulsively. And in a new article on Men’s Journal, the rapper details his compulsive exercise regimen. “In the early days,”… More »

Superproducer Mark Ronson stopped by for a live in-studio session at Australian radio station Triple J today. As usual, he assembled a crack team of musicians to back him up, including Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Kirin J. Callinan on guitar. The band performed a great psyched-out cover of Queens Of The Stone Age’s “I… More »

Lollapalooza takes place this weekend in Chicago, and most of the sets from the festival will be livestreaming via Red Bull TV in case you can’t (or don’t want to) leave the comfort of your own home. Some of the acts performing this weekend include Paul McCartney (with a highlights-only set streaming), Metallica, the Weeknd,… More »

Drake has already released not one but two diss tracks in response to Meek Mill’s ghostwriting allegations. After Funkmaster Flex promised a Meek response track Monday night on Hot 97 and failed to deliver, people were pissed, and everyone began to wonder if this mega-beef were already over. But no — the soap opera continues! More »